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Antique Road Show

Sometimes the trip that starts out on the wrong foot can prove to be the most rewarding. You know, showing the fortitude to overcome the initial hassles (missed connection! lost luggage!) and disappointments (tiny cabin! tainted seviche!) can turn a vacation into a journey, leisure into fulfillment. Such is the case in tagging along with the travel writer Justin Marozzi in “The Way of Herodotus,” as he follows in the footsteps of one of the world’s first travel writers and, yes, “father of history.”

Marozzi starts with a solid plan: to wander the limits of what was Herodotus’s world and look at its nations and people through classical eyes. Thus the book is one long digression — exactly what Marozzi rightly considers Herodotus’ “Histories” themselves.

First the missteps. Marozzi starts his journey in the tourist trap of Bodrum, Turkey, which was called Halicarnassus when Herodotus was born there around 480 B.C. It’s a digression too far: Herodotus had little interest in his hometown, possibly because he put on his traveling sandals and skipped town decades before the completion of its Wonder of the World, the tomb of Mausolos. Marozzi goes farther astray with two America-bashing chapters set in Baghdad, a city built more than a millennium after Herodotus died. Then to Babylon, which Herodotus described in detail but may not have visited; if so, he inexplicably failed to notice the Hanging Gardens.

Off to Egypt, thank the gods. Herodotus had the time of his life in the Nile valley, and Marozzi is infected by his enthusiasm. He raises the level of his descriptive powers and engages more of the locals, from tour guides to Cairo intellectuals to an eccentric academic who is testing Herodotus’s instructions on mummification using rabbits.Discussion, invariably, comes around to Herodotus’s famous line that “Egypt is the gift of the Nile” and whether that should be taken as a slight against the Egyptians themselves, who understandably feel they had no small part in creating the world’s first stupendous civilization.

Also, a stellar digression: Marozzi strikes out into the desert seeking the oasis town of Siwa, today a sub-rosa gay travel destination but some 2,300 years agothe place Alexander the Great visited to ask the local oracle whether he was indeed the son of a god. Alexander got the answer he wanted, but Marozzi’s skeptical search of the Temple of Ammon’s architectural oddities indicates that this most likely had less to do with a divine contention than with human charlatanism.

Then to Greece, where instead of mooning about the touristified battle sites of Thermopylae and Marathon, Marozzi lays waste to a three-day conference of pretentious academics. (Oh, how Herodotus — “part learned scholar, part tabloid hack, but always broad-minded, humorous and generous-hearted” in Marozzi’s words — would have snickered at the conceits of postmodernism.) And then — digression of all wonderful digressions — he finagles dinner at the Peloponnesian villa of the legendary British travel writer and World War II hero Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor, in his 10th decade but still full of retsina and vinegar.

Marozzi finishes at the spot where the aspirations of Herodotus’s greatest anti­hero, the Persian kingXerxes, also came to an end: in the shadow of Turkey’s Mount Mycale. Taking in the scene of the last great battle of the Persian-Greek wars from the nearby island of Samos, he talks of East and West with an Orthodox priest and a louche hotelier named Alexis, who, inspired perhaps by copious amounts of the “Samian wine” made famous by Lord Byron, offers the perfect coda to Marozzi’s book: “All myths have a nucleus of truth.”

THE WAY OF HERODOTUS

Travels With the Man Who Invented History

By Justin Marozzi

Illustrated. 348 pp. Da Capo Press. $27.50

Tobin Harshaw is an editor with the ­Op-Ed page of The New York Times and the writer of its Weekend Opinionator blog.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Antique Road Show. Today's Paper|Subscribe